Would you send your ten year old child to travel unaccompanied 1,800 miles from Guatemala to the United States - riding on top of gang-infested trains? The mainstream media and federal government would have you believe that it's quite commonplace south of the border. So much for "immigrant family values".

However, investigative reporting has indicated that while these children may leave Guatemala, very few of them make it all the way through Mexico on the top of trains.48 Which prompts the unanswered question: where are they going and how do mass numbers of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) sneak into the United States?

It's anticipated that 60,000 children will be sent up - or sent for - to sneak into the United States in 2014, and the number is expected to more than double to 130,000 in 2015. That's a quarter of a million of unattended minor illegal aliens in that two-year period alone.2

We, the taxpayers, are paying to house, care for, and transport these illegal aliens to parents and relatives in the United States. The White House has projected a staggering cost of $2.28 billion to care for and resettle child migrants from Central America, and they are asking for another $1.4 billion to keep the kids here.3 On top of that, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. announced that the Obama administration would pay for 100 lawyers to help these underage illegal aliens remain in the United States.9

Who are these Unaccompanied Alien Children and where are they from?

Unaccompanied alien children are children under 18 who have lawful immigration status in the United States - that is, they are illegal aliens who are children. In 2013, only 24 percent were under 14 years old, and 73 percent were male.24 (In June, 2014, ICE caved in to political correctness by dropping the word "alien" from the term "unaccompanied alien child".)26 The following chart shows official unaccompanied alien child referrals through the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR):

The following chart from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) shows where these alien children are sent from:24

Why are they sneaking into the US, anyway?

In 2010, the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) failed to pass the House. It specified a six-year path for illegal alien "children" between the ages of 12 and 35 to eventually become US citizens. Nevertheless, in 2012, President Obama unilaterally implemented a new program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

Now, Obama is renewing this two-year amnesty for a half-million illegal aliens.14

The message is clear to those who listen. Everyone knows that Obama isn't enforcing immigration laws. In particular, foreigners in South American countries are quite attuned to which way the immigration wind blows. They know that the US isn't deporting illegal alien children, so their rational response is to send even more. Central American newspapers are reporting that kids sent to America will be fed and cared for and will get to play Pong-pong and Foosball.19 The Center for Immigration Studies summarized interviews with 230 of these migrants, who stated that they came here to "to take advantage of the 'new' U.S. law that grants a free pass or permit."6

In the following video interview, documentary filmmaker Dennis Michael Lynch warns that the invasion is only beginning:

"It's about to get worse. . . Entire villages are emptying out and coming from Central America through Mexico to the United States. They'll be hitting in the next couple weeks. What you are seeing right now is the tip of the iceberg."

Follow the money

Remittances are monies sent by foreign-born workers (legal immigrants and illegal aliens) back to their home countries. Remittances are essentially a tax-free transfer of wealth out of the U.S. Approximately $20 billion of Mexican remittances each year disappear from the U.S. economy via the institutionalized money transfer industry, never to return.32

Central American countries obtain a significant portion of their GDP from remittances sent from the United States. Remittances to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras comprise at least 10% of each country's GDP.31,33 Thus, there is no real incentive for Central American countries to curtail the outflow of their excess population to the United States. Indeed, it results in a guaranteed revenue stream.

Cartels have cashed in on the Unaccompanied Alien Children (UAC) kiddie trade, charging a family up to $12,000 to deliver a child to the U.S. border.34

What is to be done?

Some say that it our responsibility to house, feed, clothe, and care for these kiddies while finding homes for them in the United States. Certainly, we should not let them starve. The common-sense, humanitarian, and legal thing to do would be to send them back home - along with their illegal alien parents and relatives living in the United States.

In order to shut off the flow, an effective action would be to send the National Guard to secure America's southern border. Obama established precedent when he deployed 1,200 National Guard troops in 2010. While they essentially held desk jobs, this time around they could actually spend time helping our understaffed, underpaid, and highly dedicated Border Patrol agents.

For the cost of taking care of these kids, we could secure our border. As John Derbyshire points out4, if you divide $2.28 billion by two thousand miles of border, you get a little over a million dollars per mile. Every year. The Israelis spend less than that to safely secure their own border. For that amount, we could permanently staff border patrol posts every ten miles, and have rapid response teams and drone surveillance to boot.

Naturally, President Obama isn't lifting a finger - nor his infamous executive pen - to secure our border. Not wanting to miss a grand - and grandstanding - opportunity to cater to Undocumented Democrats, the White House is framing the onrush of kiddies as a "humanitarian crisis". Senator Jeff Sessions noted that "Obama has nobody to blame but himself," although perhaps missing the point that Obama is achieving precisely the results he is looking for.

A manufactured crisis - Cloward Piven strategy

In the 1960's, Marxists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven developed a hard-hitting strategy (the Cloward Piven strategy) to overload and collapse democratic welfare states. The idea was to inundate the system with demands which could not be morally refused. The fiscal cost of these demands would ultimately break the state, paving the way for socialism.10

Barak Obama' immigration actions (or lack thereof) seem to be an efficacious implementation of this strategy.29,30 He invited these minors into the US. He has virtually gutted America's immigration enforcement system, and is talking of even more executive actions. Of course, both political parties are culpable, as there is an active bipartisan amnesty exponent in Congress.

This is a manufactured crisis of the first order - and it has backfired. Virginia voters just fired House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), predominantly because he signed on to the Republican amnesty plan and expressed intent to work with Obama on a "Kids Act" for Dreamers.22

One thing is clear: a nation without a border is not a nation. Perhaps this is how Obama intends to implement his "fundamental transformation of America".

The common-sense, humanitarian, and legal thing to do would be to send them back home - along with their illegal alien parents living in the United States. Naturally, President Obama isn't doing that. Not wanting to miss a grand - and grandstanding - opportunity to cater to Undocumented Democrats, the White House is framing the onrush of kiddies as a humanitarian crisis. Senator Jeff Sessions noted that "Obama has nobody to blame but himself," although perhaps missing the point that Obama is achieving precisely the results he is looking for...

It's expected that 60,000 kids will sneak into the United States this year, and possibly 130,000 in 2015. That's more than 20 times the 2011 influx of 6,000. It's a compounding problem - with over twice as many each year. (Here's a great explanation of exponential growth and doubling time)...

White House officials said Monday that they are treating a wave of youthful illegal immigrants as a “humanitarian situation” that requires billions of dollars in aid for shelter, nutrition, health care and education.

Officials are not treating the expected influx of 60,000 youths this year — and perhaps 130,000 in 2015 — as a wave of illegal immigrants that should be returned home.

Instead, officials are spending taxpayer funds, and converting parts of at least two military facilities, to cater to the illegals and to transport them to their illegal-immigrant parents elsewhere in the United States...

Officials expect the inflow to reach 130,000 in 2015, up more than 20-fold from the 2011 influx of 6,000 youths...

New White House estimates show that the projected costs of caring for and resettling child migrants from Central America could reach $2.28 billion next year — well over double what the administration asked for in its 2015 budget just months ago...

The $2.28 billion number compares with the $868 million requested by the administration in its budget submitted in March. That translates to a $1.4 billion, or 163 percent, increase, the scale of which confirms — even exceeds — internal estimates reported last week by POLITICO...

Moreover, OMB adds a warning in its letter that U.S. border and immigration agencies — which first interact with the child migrants — will also need an additional $166 million to cover their costs...

All younger than 18, these are Unaccompanied Alien Children — UACs in Washington’s legal shorthand. Their numbers could approach 66,000 this year — more than four times the level just two years ago...

Our southern border is roughly two thousand miles long. Divide $2.28 billion by two thousand, you get a million dollars and change per mile. This is for one year, remember.

Could we not fully secure the southern border and keep it secure for a million dollars a mile per year? Of course we could. The Israelis secure their border for far less than that, including their border across the Negev desert, which is at least as inhospitable as our Southwest.

Suppose for example we had permanently-manned border posts every ten miles along the entire length: five-man occupancy, rotating on six-hour shifts. That’s two hundred posts, twenty border patrolmen each post, total four thousand guys. Figure current cost per patrolman of $150,000 per annum with benefits, training, and so on, you’re talking annual cost 600 million dollars—what in Congressional budget negotiations is known as “dinner and a movie.” You could throw in fulltime drone surveillance and rapid-response teams for attempted crossings, and still have a lot of change from $2.28 billion.

...Most of the children are crossing over the Rio Grande Valley into Texas, often under the guidance of human-smuggling cartels, and many are seeking to reunite with parents already in the United States...

An internal memo from the U.S. Border Patrol last month estimated that, all told, 90,000 minors would be apprehended this year and 142,000 next year...

A leaked internal memo written by Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande Valley offers additional evidence of such perceptions. The document was distributed to reporters and congressional offices this week by the conservative Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for limited immigration. It is a summary of interviews on May 28 with 230 youths and women from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador who were apprehended trying to enter the United States.

The main reason the migrants had crossed into the United States was “to take advantage of the ‘new’ U.S. law that grants a free pass or permit” from the government, referred to in their home countries as “permisos,” the memo stated...

Border Patrol officials struggling to keep up with the increasing number of minors illegally crossing the Mexican border are not turning away persons with known gang affiliations. Chris Cabrera, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council Local 3307 in the Rio Grande Valley, explained that a Border Patrol agent he represents helped reunite a teenage gang member with his family in the United States. Cabrera notes the young member of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), a transnational criminal gang, had no criminal record in the U.S., but asks, “If he’s a confirmed gang member in his own country, why are we letting him in here?”

...Cabrera says this [Nagales] station is seeing between 700 and 1,500 people daily...

It’s about to get worse. . . "Entire villages are emptying out and coming from Central America through Mexico to the United States. They’ll be hitting in the next couple weeks. What you are seeing right now is the tip of the iceberg.”...

The Daily Caller reports, “a leaked estimate by a top official in the Department of Homeland Security says the 12-month inflow will reach 90,000 by October, and then grow by another 142,000 in the next 12 months before October 2015.” That’s over 230,000, nearly a quarter million that the Democrats hope to dump on US taxpayers...

Obama’s dreamy promise lures thousands to the border... Children are walking hundreds of miles across a hostile environment with little more than the clothes on their backs, accompanied by neither a parent nor other responsible adult. The numbers of these children making the treacherous journey are much higher than the Obama administration has acknowledged, according to reporting by our Stephen Dinan...

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte pinned the blame squarely on Mr. Obama’s broken border policies. “Word has gotten out around the world about President Obama’s lax immigration-enforcement policies and it has encouraged more people to come to the United States illegally, many of whom are children from Central America.”...

On Friday, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. announced the administration would pay for 100 lawyers to help young illegals remain in the United States...

Back in the Sixties, Marxists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven came up with a great strategy for overloading and collapsing democratic welfare states, paving the way for socialist tyranny. Basically, the idea was to hit the system with a tidal wave of demands it couldn’t refuse, and couldn’t possibly fulfill. The Left would then insist that the moral argument for the system remained intact, so the only way to meet those impossible demands was to scrap every vestige of Constitutional restraint and republican self-government...

There’s nothing complicated about what is happening here. Barack Obama invited these people to send their children to the United States as refugees. He’s already made illegal use of executive orders to gut the immigration system; he’s talking about doing it again, and the people of South and Central America can hear him just fine. There have been anecdotal reports of a message being spread throughout Central American countries, by everything from word-of-mouth gossip to news media: “Go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away.”...

And it’s not just the President sending those signals, since there’s a vibrant bipartisan amnesty chorus in Congress...

Newspapers in El Salvador and Honduras are promoting policies by the Obama administration that defer deportation to minors brought to the United States as children by their parents — known as "Dreamers" — and those that are housing illegal children at military bases in the South and West...

President Barack Obama is renewing his two-year amnesty for at least 550,000 younger illegal immigrants, and is rolling back education requirements and anti-fraud measures.

“Obama’s extension of his unilaterally-created immigration program not only violates his constitutional duty to enforce the law, but the changes he made to it proactively invite fraud and abuse,” said a June 5 statement by Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House judiciary committee...

Obama announced his amnesty program in June 2012, shortly before the 2012 election. Under the “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” Obama directed officials to stop applying immigration law against younger illegals who don’t commit major crimes, and to award work permits to those illegals...

...Meals are held outside three times a day in large white tents, officials said, with children allowed to have seconds if they want. Thursday's dinner was expected to be vegetable lasagna with meatballs, sautéed zucchini and parsley bread, according to a menu ...

Inside, the building was brightly lit with blue-painted cement floors, two Ping-pong tables, a Foosball table and several couches...

...In a letter to House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Thursday that asked them to end this "intentional" and "unconscionable" crisis at the border, Brewer noted that by the "Obama administration's own estimation, 230,000 unaccompanied alien minors are expected to cross through the Rio Grande Sector by the end of next year."...

Brewer condemned the Obama administration in a letter last week for not informing Arizona officials before dumping illegal immigrants in the state and asked the Obama administration to end the "dangerous" policy...

...Our country is in the midst of a crisis manufactured by President Obama and his administration's refusal to enforce our nation's immigration laws," she wrote. "It has become clear that the administration has encouraged this massive influx and intends to continue ignoring the states' calls to end this policy."...

...former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin blasted President Barack Obama and legislators in D.C.'s permanent political class for exploiting illegal immigrant children to advance their amnesty agenda.

Palin said Obama, in particular, "has orchestrated this newest 'crisis' in order to overload the system with the intention of 'fixing' the problems his own policies create – by fiat, and that infamous phone and pen; screw the rule of law."...

"Obama surely knows a nation is not a nation without borders, while we must surely know this is the 'fundamental transformation of America' that he promised and some of us warned about."...

...the GOP's willingness to go along with Obama on the amnesty issue is compelling her to renounce her ties to the GOP.

"But I have told the President there are some things that we can work on together," Cantor said. "We can work on the border security bill together. We can work on things like the Kids."

Cantor was referring to what has commonly been referred to as his "Kids Act," which, as Breitbart News reported, would grant amnesty to illegal immigrants who were brought to America through "no fault of their own"--like many of the illegal immigrant children who have been pouring into the country in recent weeks.

...Border Patrol agents along the southwest border have been directed not to speak with journalists after the public became aware that more than 47,000 undocumented [illegal alien] children have illegally entered into the country over the past eight months...

In fact, the children and adults respond with very deliberate and rehearsed answers when questioned by Border Patrol.

They immediately claim credible fear from gang violence or say, “I was scared I would be killed,” one of the Border Patrol agents working along the border told TheBlaze...

On March 1, 2003, the Homeland Security Act of 2002, Section 462, transferred responsibilities for the care and placement of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) from the Commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service to the Director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

An unaccompanied alien child is a child who has no lawful immigration status in the United States; has not attained 18 years of age; and, with respect to whom, there is no parent or legal guardian in the United States, or no parent or legal guardian in the United States available to provide care and physical custody.
See 6 U.S.C. § 279(g)(2)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement will no longer use the word “alien” in its references to illegal immigrant minors who have been apprehended without their parents at the U.S. border, according to an internal agency email.

The children have commonly been referred to as “unaccompanied alien children,” or “UACs.” With the new directive, laid out in a June 4 email, both terms will be dropped and replaced with “unaccompanied children.”

A second New York Times article report revealed that officials have caught an additional 240,000 Central American migrants since April, and are transporting many of them to their destinations throughout the United States...

The Central American parents of the 50,000 youths and children are using a 2008 law to ensure their children are transported to them for free by a relay of border patrol and Department of Health and Human Services officials. The youths are delivered to the border patrol by smugglers, dubbed coyotes, in exchange for several thousand dollars.

Half of the 50,000 Central American youths were delivered by taxpayer-funded employees directly to their parents now living in the United States, and another third were delivered to people who said they were close relatives, said the July 3 article...

...according to David Leopold, an immigration attorney in Cleveland... smugglers, who may charge a family up to $12,000 to deliver a child to the border, often tell them exactly what to say to American officials.

It appears that a significant majority of children coming across are not "unaccompanied alien children" according to the definition found in federal law...

Even where the 2008 trafficking act is applicable, provisions within the law allow its application to be limited in "exceptional circumstances", which — as one prominent Democratic senator recently suggested — might include the current border crisis.

"So up to 18 months before the FY 2013 budget was enacted, someone in the ORR office said, 'It looks like we're seeing an uptick in children coming from Central America, so we need more funding,'" Kais said. "In the summer of 2011--or earlier--somebody knew about [the border crisis]."

This an excellent, well-researched article describing the Unaccompanied Alien Children problem in depth. It focuses on the consequences of Obama's executive DACA amnesty, which include bringing infectious diseases into America via the unimpeded flow of uninspected illegal aliens across our border.

"Therefore, one must conclude that these children are being taken off the train and are being used in another criminal enterprise... the United States government has set up an elaborate and multi-layered process to respond to this threat as under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (PDF) (TVPRA) some children have been rescued, under threat of being sex trafficked... In other words, the federal government is spending a large sum of American tax money to shield Central American from the clutches of child sex traffickers. The mere existence and stated purposes of these various federal organizations legitimizes the fact that Central American children are being sex-trafficked on their way to the United States. Amazingly, this information comes from The Brookings Institute[49] which is a prominent globalist think-tank and mouthpiece organization."

It is estimated that 2.5 million Central Americans live in the United States, 60 percent of which are either undocumented or live with Temporary Protective Status (TPS) which denies them the right to petition for family reunification. Hope for reunification with children and better living standards enable family members in the United States to pay the $6-7,000 to traffickers who bring the child from his home in Central America to the U.S. side of the border. When Congress created TPS in 1990 and extended it to 220,000 Salvadorans in 2001, we failed to anticipate that they would seek to unite with their children.

Criminal social networks, operating throughout the Americas have created human trafficking rings that offer door to door service. The Mexican government’s combat against these criminal organizations has pushed them into alternative profitable ventures, including the smuggling of Central American children. We should expect that as U.S. policy changes so too will the behavior of these organizations. They will react smartly to evolving U.S. policies.